Hello guys! My name is Dea Aulia Kartini. I am 2nd year Ph.D. student in School of Physics, Suranaree University of Technology (SUT), Thailand. I want to share my experience about studying in SUT and I hope this article can help you especially for students who want to continue their study in SUT or other universities abroad.
There are a lot of advantages when you study abroad, I will talk about the advantages study in SUT. First, SUT has good facilities such as the library, laboratories, theater classroom, and sports facilities. You also can download many journals free as long as you use SUT Wi-Fi. What if you can?t download it? Just come to the library and tell the officers, they will download it for you and it?s free. If you like doing sports activities; you can enjoy the sports facilities like gym, yoga class, aerobic class, badminton, etc for free.
If you study abroad, you will meet a lot of people from many countries such as Germany, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos, Japan, Pakistan, Iran and more. Sometimes there are some exchange students or guest researchers who come to SUT. You can have a lot of foreign friends and broaden your connections. You also can learn a lot from them about their culture and country. Besides that, SUT always holds two Thailand festivals named Songkran Festival and Loy Krathong Festival; you also can experience Thailand culture here. Another advantage of studying in SUT is, you can learn from professional lecturer and most of them are graduated from universities in US and UK (most of them are Ph.D. graduated). They will help you with your study or research and give a lot of advice about your research.
However, when you study abroad, you will face many things that might be a problem to you. You must prepare yourself for these challenges. First, if you are a Muslim, it is quite hard to find Halal food around the campus. Well, there are some Halal foods in the cafeteria but they only open at lunchtime and you must buy breakfast and dinner in the market which doesn?t have many options for food. The second one is the language barrier. The Thai people speak Thai language, not many people can speak English maybe only lecturer or some students, so you will find it hard to communicate with local people when you want to buy food or ask for some information. Thai people are very shy to talk with a foreigner because they cannot speak English very well so maybe you need to approach them first and use an easy word to speak with them.
In the class you maybe face some difficulties such as the lecturer will teach in English and maybe you will not understand their words because of we, Indonesians, learn in Bahasa Indonesia and knew ?science term? in Bahasa Indonesia which is different when you say in English. So now you all know some challenges that you will face. I hope you can prepare yourself a lot for enrolling study abroad. Good luck with your study and see you in SUT.